awaiting review
Constellations
awaiting review
Too Cool To Be Forgotten
awaiting review
Impossible People
awaiting review
The Nib – Drugs Issue – Vol 2 No 8
awaiting review
Cannon Ball
awaiting review
A Mess of Everything
awaiting review
Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame
awaiting review
Bottoms Up!
Book Review by Gene Bild I’ve long thought an anthology by a range of ex-addicts and other sober folk telling their life stories was overdue. It’s now arrived as a graphic novel and that’s surely icing on the cake. Forty-four mostly anonymous souls were paired with cartoonists and then bared all, delivering gripping tales of sad descent and then some measure of redemption. I binge-read Bottoms Up! cover to cover in one sitting and here mention a few of its highlights. Accepting the premise that these are first person narratives, the mere fact of their telling implies the recovery,… Read More
Alcohol Addiction: a Memoir and a Fiction
Guest Review by Gene Bild Books relating personal battles with drugs and alcohol naturally tend to feature the authors as characters. While Ollmann distances himself somewhat by fabricating a stand-in alter ego named Caleb Wyatt, Nagata renders her harrowing warts-and-all story of hospitalization and eventual semi-recovery realistically. The two stories are quite different in tone. Nagata’s story is a memoir, an account of her several-year binge and eventual hospitalization. Not only is Ollmann’s novel fiction, but he ensures our awareness of this with the book’s title. Ollmann’s book is gently playful and quite funny, and not the dark whistle-as-you-pass-the-graveyard humor… Read More